- Never has a police siren sounded more like someone fiddling with the controls of their new synthesizer fresh out of the box. #
- "No texts were harmed in the making of this text." –Jonathan Lethem, from his book on John Carpenter's They Live. #
- Oh, Clone Wars is better than at least three of the Star Wars movies because it's actually a serial instead of being inspired by serials. #
- My new fave @soundcloud group, focused on music made from words: http://soundcloud.com/groups/word-music #soundpoetry #
- The fog horns are in heat. #
- â–º Afternoon audio stream: Mozart, chopped and screwed: http://j.mp/i0DLsF "Accursed Confounded" by Guy Birkin #
- The International Congress of Sound & Vibration http://j.mp/hchGms … Not a new record label, band, record pool, or club night. #
- "Durable contacts provide reliable connections with repeated mating cycles." Yes, I'm shopping in the USB-cable section. #
- RIP, Trish Keenan, singer with the group Broadcast: http://warp.net/records/broadcast/a-statement #
- Fog horns sound like an orchestra tuning up. #
- Rain-soaked copy of Fahrenheit 451 on sidewalk. #
- Murder at Geary & Polk. Such a mix of camera crews, bystanders, suited detectives and uniforms, I didn't know if it was real or a film set. #
- Good news: more sound than ever in museums. Unintended consequence: those sounds overlap. #
- Apparently photography isn't allowed in the @sfmoma exhibit Exposed, the subject of which is surveillance. (You can't make this stuff up.) #
- Apparently I had about 30 programs (excuse me, apps) running simultaneously on my iPod Touch. #oops #genius #
- Mobile audiostream review: Pandora (interesting), SoundCloud (very interesting), police scanners of the world (yowza). #
- RIP, composer Roland Kayn (b. 1933) via http://classicaldrone.blogspot.com/2011/01/roland-kayn-1933-2011.html #
- #nexusstestdrive Day 2/30: Virtual kboard not so bad. May learn to live with it. Ingenious: extended-hold numerals on top row. #
- The vaguely dubsteppy minimal techno that's creeping in my headphones is only improved by the occasional passing car. #
- I'm all for anti-trust laws, but I wouldn't mind all manufacturers of baby onesies agreeing on a single pattern of buttons. #
- Beautifully muted LED art, like an LED pinhole video camera: http://j.mp/fkKehc By Jim Campbell, currently at Hosfelt Gallery in Manhattan #
- Website looks like it's from 1997 but Walter Murch gets 2011 career award from Motion Picture Sound Editors http://mpse.org/ via @usoproject #
- Seriously, Android 2.3 still doesn't have Bluetooth keyboard support? #nexusstestdrive #
- Two vibrant seaquence.org tunes: @aaronkoblin's "pwnie" http://bit.ly/f7YGJ7 & @kristinhenry's "Triplet" http://bit.ly/hzbn6O (via @gaffta) #
- Ads for Google Nexus S appear in apps on my Nexus S. Surprised the Big G can't tell I own one: Sign of privacy, or diabolical cover story? #
- Is eating Alaskan lox part of this blood libel? #
- If I Had a Hammacher Schlemmer Catalog #middleclassprotestsongs #
- Talking Tofu Rice Bowl Blues #middleclassprotestsongs #
- This Land's End Catalog Is Your Land's End Catalog #middleclassprotestsongs #
- Help Save the Youth of American Apparel #middleclassprotestsongs #
- 911 Is a Sitcom Pilot #middleclassprotestsongs #
- Fortunate Sundae #middleclassprotestsongs #
- Day one (and first tweet) on Nexus S. The phone's keyboard nullifies contractions by requiring extra steps to accesd the apostrophe. #
- OK, gonna try a phone without a physical keyboard for a month. We'll see how this goes. (Nexus S.) #
- Tuesday noon siren, more science fiction than usual. #
- Got direct mail addressed to Disquiet.com HR department. Almost as fun as emails from near-graduates asking about internships. #
- NYTimes correction published 2 days after John Cage's initial 1992 obituary mis-characterized his music as "minimalist": http://j.mp/f8qnGZ #
- Rules of classical-music album covers: make women look as come-hither as possible, and men like spies, professors, or mad geniuses. #
- Some days the neighborhood church bells sound cozy. Others they sound like something out of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. #
- And the netlabel world is classical, too: http://shskh.com/ [@gurdonark: Lucas Gonze's acoustics dispel notion "netlabel" is all electronic] #
- "Leave the instant packet behind" is to news coverage of ramen what "Bang! pow! Comics aren't just for kids" is to news coverage of comics. #
- Music those previous tags refer to is Dred, an EP of atmospheric beats by Jimmy Penguin: http://bit.ly/hfnb5F #
- Great tag sequence: ambient hip-hop electro electronic experimental electronica experimental hip hop skratch music Ireland (via @primusluta) #
- Lot easier drawing cool LP player than CD player. Harder still with sampler. But this insane J Dilla tribute does it up: http://j.mp/dXO0d8 #
- Late night reading, writing, & listening to music on noise-reducing headphones. As a result of which, I feel the bus pass but don't hear it. #
- Listening to Nam June Paik's "Hommage à John Cage" makes it even more difficult to listen to Girl Talk. #
- Best thing about phonography e-lists isn't siren-test alerts. It's geocoded siren-test follow-up posts: http://aporee.org/maps/?loc=9014 #
- Was Public Enemy's "By the Time I Get to Arizona" about surveyors? #
- Should I worry about surveyors who show up on our block? They say they're prepping for re-pavement. But maybe they're municipal terrorists. #
- Funny: iTunes segued from one album to the next, and I didn't know the second album was Cage Against the Machine until I heard applause. #
- Experienced Michael Brook/Clint Mansell mash-up when I went to see Black Swan and the score to The Fighter leaked in from adjacent theater. #
- Used to not be able to remember where I put a book. Now I can't remember which ereader I was reading it on. #
- Menlo Park, Calif., is 12 miles from Newark, Calif. Menlo Park, N.J., is 23 miles from Newark, N.J. #mundanefringe #
- Spam on posthumous blog: "like finding a flier for a dry cleaner stuck among flowers on a grave" http://is.gd/kqNpR (by @notrobwalker) #
- "@carlstone: Today's Palindrome: Noise lesion" [Was that the sequel to Miles Davis' Live-Evil?] #
- Is there no Blu-ray edition of Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva? There should be a bootleg Blu-ray of Diva — that would be appropriate. #
- A pleasure of field-recording mailing lists: advance notice on things like Cologne siren tests. It's bird migration for headphonists. #
- Pondering cost/effectiveness of swapping out (Win 7) desktop hard drives for SSD ones. After computer-free two weeks, the whir is deafening. #
- Paper.li is neat, but it seems to frequently lose sight of the context in which original links appeared (citation, yes; context, no). #
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about
Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996 at the intersection of sound, art, and technology, and since 2012 has moderated the Disquiet Junto, an active online community of weekly music/sonic projects. He has written for Nature, Boing Boing, The Wire, Pitchfork, and NewMusicBox, among other periodicals. He is the author of the 33 1⁄3 book on Aphex Twin’s classic album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. Read more about his sonic consultancy, teaching, sound art, and work in film, comics, and other media
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Current Activities
Upcoming
• February 5, 2020: The first session of the 15-week course I teach at the Academy of Art about the role of sound in the media landscape.
• April 15, 2020: A chapter on the Disquiet Junto ("The Disquiet Junto as an Online Community of Practice," by Ethan Hein) appears in the forthcoming book The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning (Oxford University Press), edited by Stephanie Horsley, Janice Waldron, and Kari Veblen. (Details at oup.com.)
• December 13, 2020: This day marks the 24th anniversary of Disquiet.com.
• January 7, 2021: This day marks the 9th anniversary of the start of the Disquiet Junto music community.Dates TBA
• There are entries on the Disquiet Junto in the forthcoming book The Music Production Cookbook: Ready-made Recipes for the Classroom (Oxford University Press), edited by Adam Patrick Bell. Ethan Hein wrote one, and I did, too.
• At least two live group concerts by Disquiet Junto members in the San Francisco Bay Area are in the works for 2020.
• I have liner notes for a musician's solo album and an essay in a book about an art event due out. I'll announce as the release dates come into focus.Ongoing
• The Disquiet Junto series of weekly communal music projects explore constraints as a springboard for creativity and productivity. There is a new project each Thursday afternoon (California time), and it is due the following Monday at 11:59pm: disquiet.com/junto.• My book on Aphex Twin's landmark 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol. II, was published as part of the 33 1/3 series, an imprint of Bloomsbury. It has been translated into Japanese (2019) and Spanish (2018).
Most Recent Posts
disquiet junto
Background
Since January 2012, the Disquiet Junto has been an ongoing weekly collaborative music-making community that employs creative constraints as a springboard for creativity. Subscribe to the announcement list (each Thursday), listen to tracks by participants from around the world, read the FAQ, and join in.Recent Projects
• 0472 / Jam Time (1 of 3) / The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio that others will complete.
• 0471 / Phase Transition / The Assignment: The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something with it.
• 0470 / Calendar View / The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen (or more) super-brief segments.
• 0469 / [Missing in Caption] / The Assignment: Make music that pushes the constraints of descriptive television captions.
• 0468 / Mirror Rorrim / The Assignment: Create a new persona for yourself, and record a duet together.Full Index
And there is a complete list of past projects, 472 consecutive weeks to date.Tags
8-bit app audio-games brands of sounds Buddha Machine chiptune classical comics copyleft field-recording film free free download gadget generative i-hop IFTTTgram installation ios ipad iphone ipod ipod touch junto live-performance live performance modular netlabel noise recommended stream remix saw2for33third science-fiction score site-maintenance software sound-art sounds-of-brands studio journal this week in sound turntablism TV video video-games voiceMost Recent Comments
- paolo i. on Ambient Gets More Trombones: “very nice and thank you for sharing. this (and yesterday’s video) is probably the current segment of an uninterrupted line… ”
- Dietmar Sittek on 10 Favorite Ambient/Electronic Albums of 2020: “My favorite album of the year and equally the favorite ambient album is by Ferr “As above so below”. Proved,… ”
- jet jaguar on Chris Herbert’s Sketches: “Thanks for sharing, Marc, I’d missed this one and really like Chris Herbert’s stuff. So far I’m enjoying the wider… ”
- Kent Sparling on RIP, Harold Budd (1936 -2020): “a hero, a genius thank you Harold for all your gifts to us. ”
- Yves Meynard on Cross-Device Ambient: “Lovely piece, thank you for giving us a chance to discover it! ”